You are assuming that she is spending less than $100,000 a year. If she has expensive tastes, she can still be costing money in spite of the 6 figure salary.

Go and grab "Torchlight." It is a Diablo Clone by the people that wrote the original Diablo. (i.e. before Blizzard was infested with the evil known as Activision.)

Torchlight is a good, hi-res knock-off of Diablo and it is available through GOG. (It also made its way into the Humble Bundle.) If you like Diablo, you will like Torchlight.

They also recently release Torchlight 2 with online options that compete with Diablo III. With Torchlight, you contribute your cash to a small Indie company instead of corporate fat cats.

And if we all bought from Pirate Bay, eventually there would no longer be any more quality ebooks.

O'Reilly is a decent publisher. Many of there books are well organized and are worth the money. And unlike the f-ing RIAA/MPAA, their products are DRM-Free. They let you copy it to any device you want; they will even put it directly into your dropbox folder if you would like them to.

Many people who pirate content claim that "if they had the money..." or "if they let me use it on ZZZ device..." Well now is your chance. Everything is on sale, and they do let you use it on any device that can read it Put up or shut up.

For the record, I own about 25 O'Reilly ebooks. I even own a bunch more older titles but I stopped buying printed tech books because I find dropbox and pdfs on my tablet much easier than a broken bookcase and lugging printed material around. (Though I will add the files to my dropbox account manually instead of storing my credentials on their server.)

Actually, I feel the reverse... all of the games I have bought recently have been through the Humble Bundle which are all indie and all work on Linux. The few games that have not been through the Humble Bundle have been through GOG.com and work on wine.

The last big studio release I have bought was C&C 3. After that I just felt that DRM became too restrictive. (A big reason for buying humble bundle and GOG games.)

I did buy one indie game about a year ago that did not work on Linux, and that was Torchlight. (which I recently was released under Linux through the humble bundle.) I actually ran Torchlight in a virtual machine.

As suggested by the article, because I have not been beholden to windows only games, I have not used windows since XP.

Well if you had more than half a brain, you would have voted. It is your only power to prevent the things you do not like in politics.

While I do not see the dictatorship aspect, a two party system is one of our biggest problems... However, you did nothing to stop it, even an AC that replied to you earlier realizes that if a 3rd party gets 5% of the vote, they qualify for federal election funding in the next race. That is the first step to get rid of the two party system.

Yet, in spite of this, you still sit home and do not vote. You do absolutely nothing to help yourself and everyone else. You let the corrupt incumbents stay in office instead of attempting to vote them out. All it takes is for our elected officials to actually fear for their job to get them to listen to the people; right now they only listen to the people who finance their campaigns... If they get voted out, or narrowly squeeze by, they will be more likely to listen to the people the next time.

One thing that the Obama campaign proved this year, is that it is people turning out to vote that will get you elected, not getting more campaign contributions. (Of course, trying to get them to realize that themselves will be difficult at best base on the number of "give me more money" emails they sent out this year.)

In short, by staying home, you are part of the problem. A smart person realizes that the right to vote is valuable and will exercise that right whenever he/she can.

Whether I call myself a developer or software engineer will not affect my income. I'm old school (over 40) and I think that people building systems as long as I have tend not to care about titles. I'm not even sure there was a "software engineer" title when I started programming.

What I can say is that people that are coming out of college today calling themselves either tend to not have a clue what they are doing. (Of course there are exceptions, but the truly good people are hard to find.) And don't forget the recent title of "Software (or Data) Architect..." This idiots conceptualize a system, charge a ton of money, and have others build it. When it fails, they blame the developers and/or run to another job.

Then there are "Front End Developers," which are nothing more than a graphic/web designer that knows how to add some horribly written jQuery to a site and changed their name to developer in order to get paid more.

Essentially this whole debate is really about one huge issue: Large Companies are trying to turn the entire development process into something that can be done like an assembly line. They are chopping it up into little pieces so that anyone can perform the same monotonous task. The smaller your piece is, the more people that can focus on that specific area, the more people that can do it, the less you are worth. The less the companies pay, the happier they become. The more pieces there are, the more titles.

Unfortunately, (or fortunately if you really know what you are doing) the development process is not easy to break down into pieces. While certain pieces can be farmed out, the overall system will work best when one person knows how to build the system as a whole and can take the project from the requirements to a working application. (And companies rarely want to pay for these good people.)

Actually, Amazon fought the requirement to collect the taxes and remit them to the various states. Legally, you were always required to pay them.

Every state requires that you pay sales tax on every out of state purchase. It does not matter if you order it over the phone, mail order, internet, or even drive across the border to buy something in person. Every state has a tax form to claim the amount of taxes owed that should be filed with your annual tax return.

Admittedly, I have never know anyone to actually pay taxes on out of state purchases, but ignorance of the law is not an excuse. Because so few people actually comply with this law, getting large companies like Amazon to collect taxes is easier than trying to get individuals to comply.

I have heard of a few rare cases where states have actually audited people for not paying these taxes, but generally it only happens when the government gets tips from angry neighbors about large purchases. Even then, I have only heard of states that have completely replaced all income tax with sales tax taking this drastic measure.

Removing Bing from Google's index hurts Mircrosoft. After all, Microsoft's average user needs to use google to find bing...

Its not ironic at all if you think about it. Slashdot was original created by geeks for geeks. It became popular and later the original geeks became a minority. The original creator is no longer involved and it is being sold every few months to another company trying to monetize it.... Sounds like a microcosm of the internet itself.

None, after all, no one in congress does any work. (either party)

The most recent of which was only a few days ago, and I actually found out about through ARS, not slashdot...

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/09/slashdot-sourceforge-freecode-sold-to-jobs-site-company/

Makes you wonder if they are starting to regret their role as a sex slave.

You need to talk to an accountant. My company is an S-Corp. I need to keep everything separate, and my accountant files a return for my business and a separate return for my personal finances.

Personally, I find that idea pretty disgusting.

But, as long as the monkey is willing to do it and you are not forcing him, I do not care what you are doing in the privacy of your own home.

However, the benefit of the S-Corp is that after you pay all employees a modest Salary (including the owner) You can pay out profits as capital gains to the share holders. (S-Corps have shares that can be bought/sold; but I assume most people on Slashdot will just be the sole owner of all their company shares.) The capital gains are then taxed at 15% which is usually much lower than your normal income tax bracket.

Of course due to various laws you want to talk to an accountant about this. Each state is different, and the IRS will not be happy with you (i.e. audit, possible fine) if it deems that you did not pay yourself an appropriate salary.

It depends on the various laws in your state, and your particular situations, but the S-Corp starts making more sense then the LLC when you have revenues of $50,000-75,000. The more money your company is making the better deal the S-Corp becomes. As mentioned by an earlier post, you will need an accountant with the S-Corp, and the cost savings of the S-corp will need to outweigh the extra fees in managing the corporation. An S-Corp is usually more expensive in the cost of filing fees as well.

On a website like slashdot, it surprises me that my earlier comment was not immediately recognized as sarcasm.

As you mentioned, professing a love of windows on Slashdot is not a normal reaction. Anyone on this site doing so is either trolling or trying to provide comic relief. Seeing how I logged in instead of posting as an AC, believe me that the latter is true.